The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has warned that scammers are calling individuals listed on the national Do Not Call Registry, then pretending to work for the registry itself. Their objective is simple: to trick their targets into paying a bogus fee for renewing their registration.
Per the ACMA’s press release:
In these calls, scammers ask people for their bank or credit card details to enrol or keep their phone number on the register. The callers promise to block nuisance calls and may have some personal information about you, such as your name, address or even part of your credit card number, that makes the call seem genuine.
This simple scam illustrates why imposing new rules and trying to block bad calls will never succeed in stopping scams that occur over the phone. By definition, there are already rules that state organizations should not be making unsolicited calls to anyone on a registry of people who want their privacy to be respected. Criminals do not obey rules. Far too much focus is placed on using technology to identify calls that should be blocked as if it would ever be possible to determine in advance what each call is going to be about. It seems likely that a growing number of countries will implement technology to scan SMS messages for content related to scams so those messages can be blocked automatically, but it would take a big leap of faith for any society to apply equivalent technology to listening to a voice call as it happens.
Anyone could run a Do Not Call Registry scam like this from their own home. The scammer needs to have access to a copy of the registry and be able to obtain enough SIM cards to rotate the numbers they use for outgoing calls on a regular basis. The final requirement is that the scammer has the chutzpah to socially engineer a stranger into sharing their credit card details. The only sure way to reduce crimes like this is to give law enforcement agencies the resources needed to arrest and punish the people responsible.
